Hotel finder distills reviews from across the web

Good hotels can be hard to find, but not for lack of candid advice. The sheer number and dispersed nature of reviews on the web are what can make the process difficult, and that’s where Raveable comes in. Zeroing in more narrowly than the likes of TripAdvisor, Raveable aims to provide a comprehensive view of hotels across the United States by aggregating and summarizing millions of reviews from sites far and wide. Drawing from more than 35 million reviews of some 55,000 US hotels, Raveable analyzes and condenses such opinions into rankings for hotels nationwide. The company begins by collecting basic information from the hotels themselves. It then gathers travel reviews from all over the internet, including well-known sites like TripAdvisor, Expedia and Travelocity as well as lesser-known contenders such as individual travel blogs. Taking into account factors including the quality of the originating site, the date of the review and the reputation of the original author, Raveable then creates colour-coded rankings for each hotel using a weighted combination of all the factors it considers. Room quality, service, value and the extent to which patrons would recommend a hotel all get individual rankings, while overall rankings compare the hotel with those in the same price range as well as all others in that city. Finally, going beyond numbers, Raveable’s patent-pending technology uses semantic analysis to analyze and distill reviewers’ comments about each hotel, summarizing the good and the bad about its rooms, location, service and overall. Free for users, Raveable earns revenue each time a visitor books a hotel through one of its booking partners. Indeed, it’s the smart hotels that are turning transparency tyranny into transparency triumph by welcoming the spotlight when it shines on them and using it to grow, to improve, and to win new customers. Then there are the facilitators like Raveable, which stand to earn a pretty penny making it all happen. (Related: SeatGuru for hotel rooms — Hotel search tool that’s all about location — Hotel search? Video completes the picture.)